Democracy and Reaction Author:L T Hobhouse Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE INTELLECTUAL BEACTION r I iHB political reaction briefly adverted to -- above is the expression of a far-reaching change in the temper of t... more »he time, which is by no means peculiar to our own country or to the sphere of politics. It is common to the civilised world, and penetrates every department of life and thought. If it is to be summed up in a word, we should call it a reaction against humanitarianism. The sixty years which followed the Battle of Waterloo formed a period of fairly rapid social progress and of social progress correlated with an advance in social and moral science. Political enfranchisement, the reform of the Government services, Free Trade, the progressive regulation of the new industrial system, the abolition of negro slavery, the removal of the most barbarous features of the criminal law—these and many other reforms were all part of a great humanising movement stimulated and guided by the thought of the day. Not that any one thinker embraced or understood the whole movement. There were men like Carlyle, to whom anything like humani- tarianism seemed mere sentimentality, but who, in spite of themselves, sympathised with certain sides of the onward movement, and did service in protesting against the too narrow interpretation of it by some of their contemporaries. But it is possible to characterise the thought of a generation without restricting one's view to a single thinker or a single school, and it is fair to say that the thought of the period in question was humanitarian—that is to say, it was concerned not merely with the direct alleviation of suffering and prevention of cruelty, but with the removal of fetters, the opening of opportunity to individual and national self-development, the utilisation of vastly increased material reso...« less